The present invention relates to vehicle maintenance and more particularly to a foldable mechanic's creeper that may be conveniently and compactly stored, especially in an automobile or recreational vehicle.
A conventional mechanic's creeper has a low-slung rectangular body-supporting platform with casters at its corners for rollably supporting the mechanic in a supine position beneath a vehicle. A resilient headrest member is usually provided at one end of the platform for supporting the mechanic's head. Although the conventional creepers of the prior art are widely used by professional mechanics in automobile repair facilities, and by serious automotive hobbyists in their home garages, they have limited use in roadside or emergency situations because they are inconvenient or impractical to store in a vehicle.
Various foldable and/or collapsible creeper structures have been disclosed in earlier attempts at overcoming the size limitation of conventional creeper construction. Unfortunately, none of the creepers of the prior art has found wide application in emergency and/or roadside use, particularly for recreational vehicles, because they exhibit one or more of the following disadvantages:
1. They are bulky, requiring more storage space than is available or allocated for vehicle or in-home storage;
2. They are difficult to store in that they are irregularly shaped;
3. They are subject to entanglement with other stored objects, and unwanted contamination by dirt and grime from the storage environment;
4. They are difficult to use in that they are awkward to set-up and awkward to fold or collapse; and
5. They are expensive to produce.
Thus there is a need for a collapsible mechanic's creeper that is particularly compact and easy to store, that is adequately sized and configured for effective support of a user's head as well as his body, that is easy to use and inexpensive to produce.